Wednesday, February 15, 2023 — 5
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

I first found Joe Pera through a 
video titled “Joe Pera Talks You to 
Sleep,” an animated special from 
Adult Swim that would become his 
show “Joe Pera Talks with You.” In 
the Adult Swim episode, Joe tries to 
help you relax before going to bed, 
talking in a soft, monotone voice 
about things such as pretzel facto-
ries and Pennsylvania Dutch barns. 
I instantly felt comforted and at 
home. 
For me, home is in Michigan’s 
Upper Peninsula, specifically a small 
northern area called “The Keween-
aw.” It’s where I was born, where 
I was raised and where I want my 
ashes scattered one day. Writing this 
makes me feel as though I’ve already 
resigned to staying in one place for 
the rest of my life, that I’m closing 
doors and opportunities based on 
the comfort of my hometown. But 
don’t get me wrong — I do want to 
leave that place, for a decade or two, 
at least. However, the impact that 
growing up in that area had on me 
and the appreciation I have for it has 
made me realize that I will never be 
able to leave it behind. During this 
period of my life, where I find myself 
starting to redefine where my home 
is, being able to talk about and con-
nect with people over my birthplace 
feels comforting. 
So when I found out that “Joe 
Pera Talks with You” takes place in 
Marquette, Mich., just two hours 
away from where I was born, I knew 
that I had to keep watching. To those 
unfamiliar with the area, Marquette 
might seem like a stand-in Midwest-
ern town. But having grown up near-
by and spending a lot of time there, 
the landmarks and natural beauty 
are important to me. Pera recog-
nizes and highlights these details 
throughout the show, but especially 
in the first episode “Joe Pera Shows 
You Iron.” Here he walks across 
the black rock beaches beside Lake 
Superior and visits the Higgins 
Bingo Supplies store, all while talk-
ing about his love for their region’s 
rock and mineral formations. Being 
able to recognize these things adds 
a new layer to the comfort of Pera’s 
show, like when you pull up an extra 
blanket from the foot of the bed in 
the middle of the night.
The culture and people of the 
area are captured in a magical way 
that makes them feel familiar to 
me. Pera’s character in particular is 
simple, modest and quiet. He drives 

a 2001 Buick and eats strawberry ice 
cream when he celebrates. The most 
animated that we see him is when he 
discovers the song “Baba O’Riley” by 
The Who and stays up all night lis-
tening to it over and over again. It’s 
these quaint little mannerisms that 
remind me of people from my home-
town, and that made me fall in love 
with Pera in the first place.
But it’s not just him that reminds 
me of people back home. In the 
episode “Joe Pera Takes You to 
Breakfast,” Pera brings us with him 
to a diner for a Saturday morning 
breakfast. The biggest conflict of 
the episode is his deciding what to 
order, and while he tries to make up 
his mind he talks with the people 
he knows at the diner. These people 
are familiar to any Midwesterner: 
the group of retirees having their 
weekly bullshittin’ session, or the 
kid waiting for his mom to get off 
of her shift as a waitress. They don’t 
feel like caricatures; they’re the very 
same type of people that I would 
find sitting in a similar diner in my 
hometown. It’s real, it’s human and 
it’s my home.
Seeing someone else express their 
love for the area makes me love it all 
the more. It’s the same way that you 
excitedly talk with someone you 
meet at a party who is from the same 
suburb of Chicago as you. It’s con-
necting over something that shaped 
me into who I am today, and is a way 
for me to be reminded of a place that 
I’m away from for most of the year 
now. It feels like Pera knows me, 
even if it is just a part of me. 
I’d like to end this piece by shar-
ing a bit about my favorite episode 
with you. In the third episode of sea-
son one, titled “Joe Pera Takes You 
on a Fall Drive,” Pera takes us along 
with him on his annual fall loop 
drive, which he does every year on 
the Saturday following Halloween. 
His goal is to give his jack-o’-lantern 
a send-off down a waterfall, and, by 
doing so, he will be able to heal the 
part of his soul that he lost when he 
gave his pumpkin life. He chooses 
to do this at Tahquamenon Falls, 
which are the largest waterfalls not 
only in the Upper Peninsula, but in 
the entire state.
The episode comes to a close with 
Pera returning home to cap off the 
night with a warm apple roasted 
over a bonfire, accompanied by a 
tune he wrote called “Warm Apple 
Night.” Pera takes a bite of the apple, 
and then delivers the episode’s final 
line: “And just like that, I can feel my 
soul grow back.” 
Me too, Joe. Me too.

Joe Pera talks with me

Making change a friend through 
‘Hours Were the Birds’

Design by Grace Filbin

MITCHEL GREEN
 Daily Arts Writer 

HUNTER BISHOP
Senior Arts Editor

How ‘Before Sunrise’ uses space
 to build intimacy

CLAIRE SUDOL
Music Beat Editor

One 
of 
cinema’s 
greatest 
romances is seen in Richard 
Linklater’s 
decades-spanning 
“The Before Trilogy.” The series 
tracks the relationship between 
Jesse (Ethan Hawke, “The Black 
Phone”) and Céline (Julie Delpy, 
“Three Colors: White”) from 
meet-cute to the crumbling of 
their relationship. The swelling 
romance felt in “Before Sunrise” 
flows naturally into the thorny 
regret felt in “Before Sunset,” 
which ultimately leads to the frus-
trating pain and conflict felt in 
“Before Midnight.” But, in order 
to work as a series, we have to buy 
their relationship from the very 
beginning. We must understand 
how this deep connection could 
be formed between the two after 
spending just one day together and 
not seeing each other for another 
nine years. “Before Sunrise” per-
fectly lays the groundwork for the 
entire series by building intimacy 
between Jesse and Céline using 
space in ways only the medium of 
film can.
The ways people typically 
build intimacy are all present in 
“Before Sunrise,” like opening up 

to one another and touching each 
other. But those alone don’t con-
vince the viewer of the relation-
ship between Jesse and Céline. 
As much as Hawke and Delpy’s 
palpable chemistry adds to the 
audience’s understanding of their 
deep connection, what makes 
the exploration of this relation-
ship more powerful as a film — as 
opposed to seeing it on stage or 
reading it in a book — is the way 
Linklater constricts the space 
around the characters to force 
them closer together.
When Jesse and Céline first 
meet on the train to Vienna, their 
conversations are shot to create 
distance between them — space 
that will evaporate by the end 
of the film, but will come back 
when they leave each other. When 
each one is speaking, they either 
appear alone in the frame — with 
the excess space around them 
creating a sort of bubble that the 
other is trying to break down — or 
they appear together but spaced 
on opposite ends of the image, the 
table creating an artificial bound-
ary between them. They each try 
to get close to the other, leaning 
over the table to shrink the dis-
tance between them, but a final 
barrier needs to be broken. Jesse 
needs to ask her to get off the train 

with him.
Later, once in Vienna, the two 
ride the tram around town, kill-
ing time with no destination in 
particular. They head to the back, 
away from the rest of the tram’s 
patrons. Linklater gets Jesse and 
Céline shoulder to shoulder in the 
frame, but not all over each other 
yet. Jesse tries to brush a loose 
hair out of Céline’s face but stops 
himself. Céline seems like she 
might be trying to lean into Jesse’s 
arms but never does. They’re get-
ting closer to that physical intima-
cy, but they aren’t there just yet. 
And yet that doesn’t stop them 
from building intimacy in other, 
non-physical ways. Here, the two 
begin to have more frank, per-
sonal discussions about sexuality 
and love.
As the intimacy between the 
two builds, so too does the ten-
sion, and the crux of this ten-
sion comes when the two find 
themselves cramped in a listen-
ing booth playing Kath Bloom’s 
“Come Here.” The unbroken 
close-up shot of them brings them 
as close as we’ve ever seen them, 
and the two, trying not to let the 
other see them smiling and star-
ing at them, make a kiss — the 
only act of intimacy we have yet 
to see — seem inevitable. But the 

film makes us wait. Linklater 
knows he has hooked us, that we 
have completely bought into their 
relationship at this point. Despite 
our own yearnings for them to 
finally touch, we are willing to 
wait for the more physical acts of 
intimacy because the emotional 
bond between the two is finally 
palpable.
Despite the vast city of Vienna 
acting as the film’s backdrop, 
“Before Sunrise” shrinks the 
scope to wherever Jesse and 
Céline happen to be at any given 
time. The viewer is given no real 
sense of the geography of the 
city: Perhaps they’ve walked the 
entirety of Vienna in one night, 
or maybe they’ve stayed within a 
couple of districts. But that doesn’t 
matter. Jesse and Céline haven’t 
been paying attention to the city, 
only to each other, and the film 
wants us to do the same. At the 
end of the film, when the two take 
a moment to take a mental picture 
of each other, they don’t do it by a 
major Vienna landmark, they do 
it on some backstreet. The film 
has done such a successful job of 
building an intimate connection 
between Jesse and Céline that the 
characters believe nothing else 
matters except the two of them — 
and we believe that too.

Design by Grace Filbin

Adrianne Lenker has a way of 
worming herself into every cor-
ner of existence, weaving webs 
and pulling tight. The art that 
pours from her is squishy, pink 
and human — so human that I 
suspect it might bleed if a sharp 
knife were drawn over the sur-
face. It’s as if she possesses a 
deeper level of knowing, one that 
my minuscule brain could only 
hope to scratch the surface of. 
The knowledge expressed in her 
writing is so intimately felt by 
Lenker and then known so inti-
mately by the listener. 
I am a person deeply afraid 
of change, of moving on and of 
passing time — my favorite pair 
of jeans have unintentional rips 
and repair stitches, and I wear 
my same third-grade backpack 
with an embroidered wolf over 
my name in silver letters. I’m a 
creature of comfort (who knows 
the power of good denim). Even 
incremental change is deeply 
troubling to me — when the bal-
ance so carefully crafted in my 
life is threatened I feel like a bee-
tle flipped on its back, exposed, 
belly and all. But following every 
whisper of change, without fail, 
Lenker is there, flicking me back 
over, right-side-up, with a pop of 
skin against chitin. 
Lenker’s album Hours Were 
the Birds is so intimately inter-
twined with every season of life 
and time, birthed in one moment 
and dead in another. From new 
life in spring to the cold, dead-
ened winter, Hours Were the 
Birds offers us an outstretched 
hand, a foothold or even a line 
cast into deep water. “Hours 
Were the Birds” and “Light-
house” speak of the excitement 

that change deserves: “Zoom, 
zoom, zoom / Here we go, Annie 
/ No more planning / Isn’t this 
dandy?” Warm acoustic guitar, 
like sticky blood, pulses against 
the outskirts of the track, rush-
ing underneath bone and sinew, 
reddening a balmy face. “Light-
house” bursts forth from Len-
ker’s guitar, inviting us to spin 
alongside and feel the world-
building power and buzzing 
energy of newness. Hours Were 
the Birds hopes we find comfort 
in being able to revisit the places 
and memories of seasons past 
even after we have sprouted new 
growth. And it tells us if “time is 
just an ocean,” maybe it’s best to 
surrender, letting the sea push 
and pull, rather than try and 
force a path through it. Maybe 
then, when we give up control 
and balance, those proverbial 
winds of change are actually a 
god to be revered and welcomed 
in with open arms. 
On the flip side, Hours Were 

the Birds offers us a dead and 
numb winter. “Disappear” and 
“Butterfly” are for when growth 
feels hard — when you find your-
self in the in-betweens of life and 
you aren’t able to feel at home in 
any place you’ve found. It’s cold 
and frozen and stagnant. “Dis-
appear” details the experience 
of losing yourself to time, trying 
desperately to keep it all in order 
and maintain a tight fist of con-
trol. I often find myself on this 
side of change when I have “A mil-
lion different things / That I can’t 
keep together / That can’t seem 
to see / As they tumble around 
me,” when everything falls apart 
at once in a catastrophic, extinc-
tion-level event. I am left with 
the ruins of comfort and made 
to rebuild it all from scratch. It’s 
almost as if Lenker recognizes 
my fear of the in-betweens and 
forces me to face them head-on. 
While change is about letting 
the current take you and cele-
brating the newness it can bring, 

it’s also about missing the com-
fort you left behind and grasp-
ing for purchase in new places. 
“Steamboat” resolves this dual-
ity for me; even if I can see the 
value of growth and change, it’s 
okay to be afraid. The key is being 
willing to say that you’re scared, 
bare-faced and exposed — but 
hoping, desperately and humanly 
hoping, that one day you won’t 
be. Here, Lenker delves deeply 
into philosophies of change and 
acceptance, and Hours Were the 
Birds teaches me everything that 
I need to know — teaches me to 
be honest about my fears and 
apprehensions so that maybe one 
day change may be a dear friend.
And trite as it may be, if we 
still aren’t able to find comfort or 
learnedness, at the very least may 
we find solace in the fact that 
change is a universality extend-
ing past humanity — passing sea-
sons, falling fruit, melting snow. 
Existence is change, so may we 
revel in it.

The intimacy of 
comfort characters

We all have a TV show, 
a movie or a book that we 
love to get out when things 
in our lives get particularly 
stressful. We all have char-
acters that have seen us at 
our worst moments — when 
the only thing left to do is to 
turn on a sitcom and watch, 
laugh and cry with some of 
our favorite people. Art is 
intimate. It cradles us in our 
darkest moments and pro-
vides the opportunity for 
some of our most meaning-
ful 
connections. 
For 
me, 
part of what is so comfort-
ing about art is that it tells 
real stories about real people. 
So real that, sometimes, we 
relate to their experiences 
so intimately that we begin 
to recognize certain charac-
ters as ourselves. I mean, just 
how many Buzzfeed “Which 
character from ___ are you?” 
quizzes have we all taken? 
For instance, I am the quirky 
and lovable Jess Day from 
“New Girl,” played by Zooey 
Deschanel (“500 Days of Sum-
mer”). She knows me perhaps 
better than I know myself. 
She, along with her charming 
roommates, is someone that I 
could watch forever and she’d 
still warm my heart. In fact, 
she is a character that could 
likely describe me better and 
more intimately than I could 
describe myself. 
The characters whose sto-
ries and little quirks are just 
like our own are characters 
that I call my ‘comfort char-
acters.’ They’re the ones we 
love so much that we bond 
with people over them, the 

ones that we cast our friends 
as, the ones we watch just to 
have in the background while 
making dinner. This concept 
can easily get confused with 
a “comfort show” or a “com-
fort film,” but I’d argue that 
they’re actually quite differ-
ent. Instead of just provid-
ing us with that warm and 
fuzzy feeling that art so often 
does, they tell us that we are 
not alone in our experiences. 
Jess from “New Girl” shows 
me that there is something 
lovable — even admirable — 
about my funny quirks and 
crazy energy. Comfort char-
acters show us that we are 
not as alone as we think we 
are — that we are seen and 
loved. 
This is what makes art so 
intimate. 
It 
authentically 
represents the human expe-
rience and makes the world 
feel a little less vast. This is 
why we turn to our comfort 
characters; the silly Phoebe 
Buffays (Lisa Kudrow, “The 
Comeback”), the witty Lore-
lai Gilmores (Lauren Gra-
ham, “Parenthood”), or the 
hilarious 
Midge 
Maisels 
(Rachel Brosnahan, “I’m Your 
Woman”) of the TV world. 
They showcase, in perhaps 
the truest form, what it’s like 
to be human. It’s comfort-
ing for us to see ourselves in 
them and to realize that our 
intimate quirks and qualities 
are what make us special and 
beautiful. 
So, the next time you’re 
having a hard day or need 
something to turn on while 
you clean your room, maybe 
turn to a comfort character of 
your own: someone who sees 
or represents you in a sur-
prisingly intimate way.

CONSTANCE MEADE
Style Beat Editor

